Yeah, I have no issues with that as a solution to wholly broken purchases. I think those are incredibly rare though, even among digital games.

I do think a lot of Denuvo’s opponents tend to exaggerate its effects on the game’s playability, when the findings regarding cracked copies have leaned different directions in performance depending on testing method. Most people can play Denuvo games no problem, even offline.

Online requirements I certainly sympathize more with if it’s a game you like. I enjoy Hitman WoA, and wish other people would try it, but a fair few avoided it for the online requirement. I hope for legislation that ensures, someday when IOI is packing up its last employee and shutting off servers, they can also hand out the keys to an offline mode. But legislation like that (eg, SKG) doesn’t come about from pirating. It takes effort and vocalization.

Since the iPhone was released, Apple was the only place you could buy Apps from. The same has been true of a lot of niche appstore-driven devices, like VR headsets. It’ll be hard to argue that a game console, a device to run software, must produce that software on discs, and must sell those discs to other retailers.

In a way, this fight was going on between Epic and Apple over Fortnite back in 2020. Gamers just didn’t care because those devices didn’t have disc drives.

It’s hard to picture how competition could be formalized though. It’s a good thing Valve decided to create their own through the key system, but I can’t picture Sony doing something similar. We might lose discs no matter what happens - I am still trying to think through how we might win back ownership and control regardless. With a lot of goods, you could just claim price competition on things like games, but when so many gamers could barely afford one console to begin with, hardly anyone will afford a second to take advantage of Xbox prices or something.

I used to pirate, don’t anymore.

1. I was young, it was convenient, and satisfying. Eventually, I relented to the idea that I was doing it more for personal reward than for any kind of “fuck the establishment” message.
2. I got a good-paying job, and felt the satisfaction of buying a good game on sale with my own money.
3. I still maintain, as do most people, that tons of publishers are scummy and anti-consumer, but I also built more positivity towards developers that don’t exhibit such behaviors.

Even if Steam were to somehow go down for a month, by now I’ve learned about other storefronts and methods of purchase that provide a place to move to. There’s a devoted centrism to the way people consume most media franchises that basically guarantees they can flip prices to infinity, control purchases, and never suffer consequences, and piracy absolutely feeds into that; helping them to paint themselves as victims to policymakers while they rake it in.